Too Fat To Fight

Under intense pressure to trim its budget, the Army is dismissing a rising number of soldiers who do not meet its fitness standards, drawing from a growing pool of troops grappling with obesity.

Obesity is now the leading cause of ineligibility for people who want to join the Army, according to military officials, who see expanding waistlines in the warrior corps as a national security concern.

Between 1998 and 2010, the number of active-duty military personnel deemed overweight or obese more than tripled. In 2010, 86,186 troops, or 5.3 percent of the force, received at least one clinical diagnosis as overweight or obese, according to the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center.

The trend has prompted the military to reexamine its training programs and is driving commanders to weed out soldiers deemed unfit to fight. “A healthy and fit force is essential to national security,” said Cmdr. Leslie Hull-Ryde, a Pentagon spokeswoman. “Our service members must be physically prepared to deploy on a moment’s notice anywhere on the globe to extremely austere and demanding conditions.”

During the first 10 months of this year, the Army kicked out 1,625 soldiers for being out of shape, about 15 times the number discharged for that reason in 2007, the peak of wartime deployment cycles.

How do you get to be obese in the Army? Seriously, don’t they work you physically pretty hard? I would have thought it difficult to be overweight, but obese? Somebody help me understand this.

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I’m impressed that even in a conversation about obesity in the military, we are able to get comments blaming race

I am not “blaming” race, whatever that means. I was noting race as one of a number of factors, which I brought up because nobody else had yet mentioned it. I said in my first comment that others had already well explained the main reasons for weight problems in the military, and I saw no need to repeat any of those.

One or two hours of physical training a day will not counteract 22 hours of light activity or no activity. Soldiers in units that do more physically on a daily basis, such as Infantry units and maintenance units, are less likely to wind up overweight than soldiers who work as clerks, particularly if their duties keep them off the “work details” which less occupied soldiers find themselves on – mopping, litter patrol, painting, etc. More and more jobs are done on computers in the Army, same as in the outside world, and that of course puts those people at higher risk of getting overweight. And no, Army chow isn’t terribly healthy. I got out a few years ago, but they still hadn’t caught on to the concepts of whole grains and vegetables cooked with flavor.

The other major factor here of course is the draw down of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. I struggled with keeping my weight to standard myself, though I never had trouble passing the body fat tape standards, at least not until after I developed breathing issues which made strenuous workouts impossible. (I don’t recommend Iraq’s air quality to anyone.) Once that happened, I was counseled about my weight and told that if I didn’t meet the standards, I would be booted out of the military. I signed a form acknowledging this fact, along with every other over-weight-standard person in the unit. The admin people then literally took those forms and moved them to the bottom of a pile of documents to be dealt with after deployment, and put said box in storage where it would not see the light of day until we came back. We needed all the bodies we could get for deployment, and they weren’t too particular about the state of them.

Now that units aren’t deploying so much, they don’t need the bodies anymore, and those boxes are coming out of storage. These overweight soldiers have been around this whole time. The same thing happened when they shrank the size of the military in the 90s. Rules that had always been on the books were simply enforced.

(Incidentally, they did this with a lot of admin paperwork for people who came out or who were outed as gay. These people were also technically supposed to be booted from the military, but in a lot of commanders’ minds, the need for bodies outweighed that technicality. The beat clearly went on despite openly gay people serving, and I suspect that’s one reason why Don’t Ask Don’t Tell went the way of the Do Do Bird.)

I concur that the food on the bigger bases in Iraq was delicious, fattening, and not in the least bit portion-controlled. You couple that with sleep deprivation, low grade but long term stress, and tons of care packages from well-meaning folks back home, and your average desk jockey was in a losing battle against the bulge. Meanwhile, your average Infantry Joe at isolated patrol bases was doing foot patrols in 120 degree heat, carrying 120 pounds of gear, and not uncommonly getting by on half-rations for days at a time. Those guys had no trouble staying trim.

RB: “…pardon my passive construction; the military is pretty much run by autocratic passive construction, if you see what I mean.”

I usually avoid the subject of homosexuality in Rod’s threads. I am usually absent from the long comment wars on posts about SSM and the like.

I responded to Mike’s unfair comment; I see that response is now approved. Same response to you: one factor among many that nobody else had brought up.

As for your list of things into which you are sure that I would inject race, notice how none of them, save the Etruscan tongue, necessarily involve human activity. While we are at it, here are some Latin terms that may have Etruscan origin: populus, meaning “people” (in the sense of an ethnicity or nation); mundus, “world” or, ahem, “mankind”; servus, “servant” or “slave”, who in Etruria was likely to be a foreigner captured in war or piracy; and histrio, “actor” and the source of the English “histrionic”, which you and other commenters can sometimes become when I and other commenters mention race (and gays, apparently) 😉 .

In general, I like to discuss race because: 1) it is a vitally important topic; 2) much like gender, it matters to everybody (every one of us has biological ancestry, just as we are all male or female); and 3) it is a topic shrouded in taboos and propaganda which require frequent, even incessant, challenge (much as the Scriptures warn us to be ever vigilant against idolatry).

Turmarion: There is actually an increasing amount of evidence that many factors (not all of which we yet understand) are affecting the expression of our genes, resulting in more obesity and diabetes. In short, it’s not just that we’ve become a nation of lazy, gluttinous slobs. That’s something that needs to be pointed out.

Just to be the devil’s advocate, couldn’t epigenetic effects on gene expression effect whether we are lazy or gluttinous or slobs?

I think some bodies are just different to others. Its a matter of a little extra work and the old saying less in and more out. I had trouble with my weight and used this program http://tinyurl.com/d4us4a6 worked well and now I’m back to my normal weigh. I do think the BMI is total BS though.